Spring 2025 Graduate Courses
Last update: Thursday, January 23, 2025
Confirm course listings on the Directory of Classes
Bridge Lectures
Bridge lectures are advanced lectures open to all undergraduate and graduate students. They do not require an application.
AHIS GU4089 Native American Art
E. Hutchinson
T/R 4:10-5:25, 302 Barnard Hall
This introduction to Native North American art surveys traditions of painting, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, photography and architecture and traces the careers of contemporary Indian modernists and postmodernists. It emphasizes artistic developments as a means of preserving culture and resisting domination in response to intertribal contact, European colonization and American expansion.
Bridge Seminars
Bridge seminars are advanced courses open to undergraduate and graduate students. Students must submit an application, linked below each course description, in order to be considered for enrollment. Admission is at the instructor’s discretion.
Spring 2025 bridge seminar applications are due by 5pm on Wednesday, January 8th.
AHIS GU4518 Greek Sanctuaries
I. Mylonopoulos
M 10:10-12, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
In every culture there exist highly specific features, which, in their interplay, create its quintessence. In terms of Greek antiquity, temples are generally considered one of these significant cultural parameters. One easily tends, however, to forget that temples are simply a small part – and not even an essential one – of so-called sacred or religious spaces. It is the sanctuary with its precinct wall, temples, sacred groves, divine images, offerings, and – above all – the altar or altars that constitutes the central and transcendent spatial element of ancient Greek religion. Nevertheless, despite their primarily religious function, Greek sanctuaries were never simply cultic spaces; every single one of them was to various degrees an integral part of its social, political, and economic context. The occasionally problematic interpretive model of the “polis religion” makes it absolutely clear that Greek sanctuaries cannot be studied and properly understood, if they are not examined beyond the constraints of religion. Aim of the seminar is to understand the forms and functions of architecture and dedicatory objects in Greek sanctuaries while analyzing these religious, social and political spaces as the centers in which Greek aesthetics, Greek identity, and ultimately Greek culture were shaped.
Greek Sanctuaries application form
AHIS GU4534 Pastel and the Enlightenment
F. Baumgartner
T 2:10-4, 806 Schermerhorn Hall
This seminar takes as its hypothesis that pastel, an artistic medium whose rise to prominence in eighteenth-century Europe was as spectacular as it was short-lived, offers a particularly productive lens through which to consider some of the fundamental aesthetic, social, and cultural debates that helped shape Enlightenment thought. To test this hypothesis, we will study the work of celebrated pastel practitioners such as Rosalba Carriera, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Jean-Étienne Liotard, and John Russell, in dialogue with primary sources authored by artists, art critics, art theoreticians, and philosophers, whose thought found provocative responses in the luminous, fragile, and ultimately modern surfaces of pastels. Topics of discussion will include: the triumph of color in the academic discourse; the art market and the debate on luxury; craft in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie; gender, class, and cosmetics; the senses; and new understandings of the self. These discussions will be informed by recent scholarship on eighteenth-century art engaging with questions of materiality, identity, and consumption, among others. The seminar will include at least one class trip to the Metropolitan Museum.
Pastel and the Enlightenment application form
*SSOL registration for this seminar will take place in January
AHIS GU4741 Art and Theory in a Global Context
J. Rajchman
M 4:10-6, 612 Schermerhorn Hall
What is “globalization”? How does it change the way we think about or show art today? What role does film and media play in it? How has critical theory itself assumed new forms in this configuration moving outside post-war Europe and America? How have these processes helped change with the very idea of ‘contemporary art’? What then might a transnational critical theory in art and in thinking look like today or in the 21st century? In this course we will examine this cluster of questions from a number of different angles, starting with new questions about borders, displacements, translations and minorities, and the ways they have cut across and figured in different regions, in Europe or America, as elsewhere. In the course of our investigations, we will look in particular at two areas in which these questions are being raised today -- in Asia and in Africa and its diasporas. The course is thus inter-disciplinary in nature and is open to students in different fields and areas where these issues are now being discussed.
Art and Theory in a Global Context application form
AHIS GU4763 Reading Places and Images in Edo-Period Illustrated Books
M. McKelway
W 4:10-6, 806 Schermerhorn Hall
A colloquium devoted to reading illustrated books from Edo-period Japan. Texts to be covered will include Saga-bon illustrated tales, illustrated guidebooks and gazetteers (meisho zue), painting manuals, and poetry, such as Ehon Tōshi-sen, illustrated by Katsushika Hokusai. Reading and translating passages written in premodern Japanese scripts variously called hentaigana, kuzushiji, and sōsho will be the central activity of the course, but we will also consider such themes as the development of woodblock printing, the book as a format, and how the content both reflects and shapes knowledge of the subjects and themes with which they are concerned. If possible we will examine firsthand printed books in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Freer Gallery, and New York Public Library but will also take advantage of ample hi-res interactive resources available through each of these institutions. Familiarity with Classical Japanese will be useful.
Reading Places and Images in Edo-Period Illustrated Books application form
NEW COURSE:
AHIS GU4856 Cities of Knowledge: Mediterranean Artistic Interactions in the Middle Ages*
A. Shalem
M 2:10-4, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
With the Muslim expansion into the Mediterranean Basin, the capture of the Iberian Peninsula in 711, and, later on, the conquest of Sicily and South Italy by the very beginning of the 9th century, the Christian Latin West came into direct contacts with the new Muslim Empire. In fact, the new Muslim Empire, which ruled the world from Gibraltar to India, with its capital city of Baghdad served from the mid 8th century as the center of trade network which tied under its rule spaces in Africa, Asia and the South of Europe. Moreover, diplomacy between the Carolingian and the Ottonian courts with potent Muslim powers in Baghdad and Cordoba, wars and conflicts in the age of Crusade, and extensive trade ventures between western Europe and the “Orient” in the High Middle Ages brought a new aesthetic language – a sort of artistic lingua franca – that strongly shaped the art of Latin Christian Europe, Byzantium and that of the Muslim world. In this series of lectures/discussions, the artistic interactions between the three continents will be chronologically discussed, while setting our gaze in each lecture in one of the important urban centers of the Mediterranean. In addition, contact zones, such as important trade centers, and particular frontier regions located on the verges of the Christian and Muslim worlds will be highlighted as the major interactive spaces for artistic exchanges and mobility of people and objects.
*Interested students should enroll directly via SSOL
AHIS GU4946 Historicism and Restoration in European Architecture, 1789–1914 (*Travel Seminar)
B. Bergdoll
T 10:10-12, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
The aim of this seminar is to explore the relationship between changing theories of historical change and the practice of architecture in the long nineteenth century from the ideas of progress that animated architectural theory and design in the European Enlightenment to the critiques of historicism and of revivalism in the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. It is the hypothesis of this seminar that during the period one of the dominant themes of architectural form making was the notion that all understanding is historically conditioned, that an understanding of the past evolution of architectural form was necessary to defining current practices and preparing for the future, increasingly a subject of anxiety in this crucial period industrializing modernity. This relationship between theory and practice will not be considered uniquely in the realm of the history of ideas, however. Rather we will strive to “historicize historicism,” and to examine the political, social and economic stakes and settings of historicist architectural practices primarily in France, Britain, and Germany. Issues of nationalism, colonialism, the discourses of progress, of natural science, and of evolution must necessarily overlap with our joint research. A key theme that runs throughout the course is the relationship between ideas of defining an appropriate historically based style for modern practice and the rise of a culture of restoration (rather than repair) of the newly defined category of the historical monument. As a result the course will be punctuated by a series of pairs that look at a single practitioner’s practices between newly conceived construction and restoration.
Historicism and Restoration in European Architecture, 1789–1914 application form
Core Graduate Courses
Required courses for first-year students.
AHIS GR5001 MODA Curatorial Colloquium
J. Kraynak
W 2:10-4, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
The Curatorial Colloquium is a required course for first year MODA students. The course introduces students to the history, theory and practice of exhibitions and institutions; histories of curating and recent models of the “curatorial.” Readings for seminar sessions cover key topics and recent debates, including the emergence of the national museum; ideological critiques of the museum; exhibitions and politics; the shifting nature and roles of exhibitions, and the latter’s relationship to new trends in and mediums of artistic practice. As a colloquium, seminar sessions are supplemented by presentations by guest speakers from the curatorial and museum fields, curatorial walk-throughs and other off-site visits to exhibitions and various programs. Please note: some visits require either extended class time to accommodate travel, or attendance out of regular class hours.
The Curatorial Colloquium does not permit enrollment from students who are not in the MODA program.
AHIS GR5003 MA Colloquium: Practices of Art History
F. Baumgartner
R 12:10-2, 806 Schermerhorn Hall
The premise of this course is that art historians and museum professionals work with objects that need to be preserved, researched, interpreted, and displayed, among others things. To engage with these questions, students will work directly with objects from Columbia’s Art Properties Collection, while also learning from leading art professionals invited to share their expertise on topics including conservation, provenance research, curatorial practice, art writing, and public programs. Students will develop a final project in one of the course areas, based on their individual professional and academic interests.
AHIS GR5006 MODA Thesis Prep
J. Kraynak
R 12:10-2, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
The MODA Thesis Prep is a required course for MODA students who plan to commence their thesis in the Fall of 2025. The course will introduce students to the fundamentals of an MA thesis, the research and writing process, and how to devise an appropriate topic for a written/scholarly, or an exhibition-based thesis. The class will also review key methodologies in modern and contemporary art history. At the end of the semester, students will have comprised a detailed topic, a preliminary proposal, and identified a faculty adviser.
Graduate Lectures
Graduate lectures are open to graduate students and do not require an application. Interested undergraduates should contact the instructor for permission to enroll.
AHIS GR6401 Art History Against the Grain
R. Krauss
W 2:10-4, 806 Schermerhorn Hall
The foundational (and privileged) field of Western art history can said to be The Renaissance, and within that domain, the privileged trope is perspective, its centrality as a “theoretical object” and its organizational role within any study of the cultural assumptions of this style the historian wants to uncover and document. “Art History Against the Grain” will locate, analyze, and critique those foundational tropes, such as: influence, historicism, Style, and, of course, perspective.
AHIS GR6407 Minimalism and Postminimalism
B. Joseph
M 2:10-4, 807 Schermerhorn Hall
This course examines minimalism—one of the most significant aesthetic movements— and subsequent developments during the sixties and seventies. More than visual art, the course considers minimal sculpture, music, dance, and "structural" film, their historical precedents, development, critical and political aspects. Artists include: Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Anthony McCall, Tony Conrad, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Richard Serra, Beverly Buchanan, and Nancy Holt.
Graduate Seminars
Graduate seminars are open graduate students. Students must submit an application, linked below each course description, in order to be considered for enrollment. Admission is at the instructor’s discretion.
Spring 2025 graduate seminar applications are due by 5pm on Wednesday, January 8th.
AHIS GR8137 Sumerian Sculpture
Z. Bahrani
R 4:10-6, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
This seminar introduces the sculpture of ancient Sumer (south Iraq), with a focus on ancient practices and ontologies of art, the related processes of making and technological innovations, as well as image rituals and the visual manifestation of the divine. Seminar topics include historical monuments, statues of the gods, architectural sculpture and foundation images placed in the ground, and votive portrait statues dedicated in temples. In the fourth millennium BC new technologies of metallurgy, casting, the mechanical reproduction of images, and seal carvings emerged alongside the invention of writing, a technology first documented in the city-state of Uruk, Iraq. Sculpted images and monuments were inscribed with texts that reveal a great deal about the ontological and agentive, the aesthetic and the order of the divine. The seminar will study the genres of Sumerian sculpture alongside their ancient texts. It also explores an important era in the historiography of ancient art and archaeology in the first half of the twentieth century. At the time when Sumerian sculpture was first unearthed and collected, antiquity and ethnography, ruins and ancient statues became subjects of interest for Modern artists and art movements, not only for their aesthetic forms but also as areas of scholarly investigation. Archaeologies of ritual and the sacred, Sumerian and Pre- Columbian antiquity, were topics of great interest in the first half of the twentieth century, among European artists and art movements, but also for Iraqi Modernist groups such as the Baghdad Group of Modern Art and the Ruwad.
Prerequisites: Students will be expected to have previous coursework in art history, archaeology or anthropology. Reading knowledge of French preferred. Applications required. Permission of the instructor is needed for registration.
Sumerian Sculpture application form
AHIS GR8211 Ecocriticism and Medieval Art
G. Bryda
T 10:10-12, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
This doctoral seminar examines how medieval literary and visual culture shaped and reflected conceptions of God’s Creation—animals, plants, rocks, and the cosmos—and humanity’s place within it. We will explore nature as a place of exile, a divine blueprint, a source of nourishment, medicine, and amusement, and a reservoir of metaphorical meaning. We will explore topics such as Neo-Platonic cosmology, tree cults, agricultural allegories, cultural landscapes, and natural theology, while drawing on recent ecocritical and ecomaterialist approaches to consider how medieval ideas continue to shape modern interactions with the environment. Museum visits to the New York Botanical Library Rare Books/Manuscripts Library and The Cloisters’ gardens are mandatory.
Ecocriticism and Medieval Art application form
AHIS GR8212 Venice and Byzantium: Art, Architecture, and Urban Development, ca. 800–1453
H. Klein
M 10:10-12, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
Venice and Byzantium: Art, Architecture, and Urban Development, ca. 800–1453 application form
AHIS GR8318 Spolia: Architecture and Reuse (ca. 300–1600)
M. Waters
R 10:10-12, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
This seminar takes the recent explosion in spolia scholarship as a point of departure to analyze how artists and builders transformed ancient and foreign artifacts and incorporated them into new settings. It also seeks to understand the ways in which reuse has been interpreted and theorized retrospectively by historians, from Vasari who saw spoliation as a pragmatic phenomenon indicative of artistic decline to modern scholars who have argued for a wide range of interpretations—these include, but are not limited to, spolia as aesthetic choice, political gesture, revivalist impulse, religious symbol, triumphalist sign, and apotropaic talisman. While the course will focus primarily on monuments produced Italy and the wider Mediterranean world from late-antiquity to the Renaissance, students will be encouraged to think broadly about reuse as a theoretical problem across art-historical disciplines.
Spolia: Architecture and Reuse (ca. 300–1600) application form
AHIS GR8371 Strokes & Lines: On Expressive Mediality in Early Modern Art
D. Bodart
R 4:10-6, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
The graduate seminar "Strokes & Lines: On expressive Mediality in Early Modern Art" investigates how the brush stroke and drawn line gained emphasis in art practice in Early Modern Europe and were conceptualized as artistic gesture in art theory. We will discuss how the visibility of the stroke challenged the primary task of mimesis to modify perception and how the artists walked a fine line to express artistic bravura. The seminar will present the many voices that constitute Early modern aesthetic theory and consider the different artistic positions that form the floor for that discourse. The seminar will be held in two groups, on at Columbia University, leaded by Diane Bodart, the other at Yale University, leaded by Nicola Suthor. We will join forces during the semester for the close-looking sessions at the Morgan Library, the Metropolitan Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, and a three-day fieldtrip/ workshop at Casa Muraro in Venice.
Strokes & Lines: On Expressive Mediality in Early Modern Art application form
AHIS GR8601 Chinese Painting Connoisseurship: Selected Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasty Masterpieces
A. Murck
M 4:10-6, 806 Schermerhorn Hall
This seminar will look carefully at masterpieces of Chinese painting in Japanese and American collections. The aim of the course is to develop an intuitive sense of the quality appropriate for different genres, formats, and periods. Special attention will be given to the way paintings are presented from the outside title slip to inner title sheet (yin shou) to seals and colophons. We will also consider, or at least speculate on, the artist’s intended audience.
AHIS GR8603 Rimpa
M. McKelway
T 4:10-6, 806 Schermerhorn Hall
The seminar will explore the arts practiced by Tawaraya Sōtatsu (d. ca. 1640), Ogata Kōrin (1658-1716), and Sakai Hōitsu (1761-1828). Variously considered as constituting a "decorative" or "revivalist" movement in Japanese art, the artists now commonly grouped under the "Rimpa" (school of Kōrin) rubric appear to have been deeply concerned with Chinese painting, classical literature, and haikai poetry. Without the blood ties that forged bonds among other lineages of artists and artisans in Japan, what made the movement later named "Rimpa" so durable? Major texts, such as the seminal essays by Yamane Yūzō, will be read alongside primary documents. Students in the course will be expected to write a research paper related to works examined in public and private institutions in the seminar, and should have a reading command of modern and classical Japanese, or classical Chinese.
AHIS GR8813 The Materiality of Things: In Front of the ‘Post-Semiotic’ Object in the Museum
A. Shalem
T 2:10-4, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
This graduate level seminar focuses on specific medieval and early modern objects from the lands of Islam while turning our attention to the making of these artifacts. It will cover issues concerning the mining and producing substances and their taming with the help of specific tools, like for example the making and shaping of precious stones and precious materials into objects of art, the working with particular materials such as glass and rock crystals, the carving of ivory and wood, the casting of metals and ceramics, and even the making of copies and forgeries. Yet, this seminar explores also our interactions with art objects in the museum. It does so by studying the object as the subject of our inquiring gaze, while paying attention to its material, production techniques, shape and formation as related to time/science/technology/and style. An emphasis is put on the agency of substances as a no-less important tool than ‘the image’ for producing meanings. Beside the first three meetings, in which theoretical aspects concerning the ‘Material Turn’ in art history are discussed, each of the meetings takes place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the new gallery for the arts of Islam as well as in the Medieval/European show rooms. Each meeting will be devoted to one single object. Discussion about the museum exhibition context as the interactive-educational space, in which art objects are deliberately reinvented to speak (or rather answer) particular cultural demands and narrate stories and histories, will be critically discussed too. Histories of extraction of substance, real or contrived, as well as traces of the ‘hand’ of the maker while taming materials into a masterpieces and marvels will be addressed while observing objects.
The Materiality of Things: In Front of the ‘Post-Semiotic’ Object in the Museum application form
AHIS GR8907 The Temple in South Asia
S. Kaligotla
R 2:10-4, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
This seminar explores questions, approaches, and emerging directions in the study of the premodern South Asian temple and its related cultures. A freshly published monograph with a specific regional and temporal orientation will direct our focus each week. Our in-depth explorations will consider the particularities of the scholar’s project, their analytical framework and methods, their book’s organization and writing choices, and the ways in which they have expanded the boundaries of the discipline. What can we learn from each approach to the temple, both in terms of scholarly approach and writing? Studies span the medieval and early modern periods and cover the Tamil south, the Deccan Plateau, Central India, Bengal, the Indo-Gangetic plain, and Himalayan lands. We will consider new approaches to such art-historical mainstays as style, landscape, and temple sculpture and painting as well as more contemporary trends such as eco art history, sensory studies, and the digital humanities.
The Temple in South Asia application form
Cross-Listed Courses
WMST GR8001 Feminist Pedagogy
J. Bryan-Wilson
T 4:10-6, please check ISSG listings for location
Contact ISSG with questions on enrolling in this course